The Quaker Green politician Rupert Read once told me that he gets through boring meetings by imagining the participants stark naked and preening each other like apes. After reading Carl Safina’s book (available in many editions; first published in 2015) I too have been seeing the behaviour of my fellow humans, including myself, as strikingly similar to that of the animals he writes about. I tend to define as ‘great’ any book or film which makes me think differently, which rewires me, so this book, according to that definition, is a ‘great’ book.

Safina is passionate about conservation. He founded and runs the Safina Center, in his words ‘a unique collective which is the creative end of the conservation-group spectrum’. ‘Facts alone can’t save the world. Hearts can. Hearts must. We’re working to make sure that hearts do.’ And he seems to be doing just this, making a difference. He’s written many books, presented TV series, and written for publications like the Guardian. His TED talk, “What are animals thinking and feeling?”, has been viewed over two million times, and is a great place to pick up quickly the book’s message. And for Quakers, his enthusiasm for engaging with creativity and the emotions, and even, if occasionally and with caution, the spiritual, gives his book a special resonance.

My expectations were high – the Washington Post trumpets ‘Once in a long while, a book is published that felicitously combines lambent writing with dazzling facts, while also illuminating our knowledge….Beyond Words by Carl Safina…is one of these exemplary books’, and, across the top of the book’s front cover, the New York Review of Books proclaims ‘Along with Darwin’s Origin of Species and Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene, Beyond Words marks a major milestone in our evolving understanding of our place in nature.’ I’m too ignorant of the field to judge these claims, but, if the book’s effect on me is evidence, they may well have substance.

The book itself is cleverly constructed for maximal effect. It’s in four sections – elephants, wolves, theory and whales. The three species-sections are fascinating accounts of these animals’ lifestyles and behaviour, which bring out Safina’s thesis that non-human animals have inner lives much more like our own than we think. His approach is to see animals as named individuals, not just anonymous performers of social roles: his question to them is “WHO are you?”. Safina cleverly uses these beautifully written eye-witness accounts of wild animals as bait – the reader is willingly seduced into more technical areas. These sections of the book are full of painfully sad details of how animals have suffered, and are suffering, from the ignorance and greed of humans, but our inevitable despair is counterbalanced by the sheer scale, variety and power of his revelations about animal behaviour, thought and personality.

The third section, on theory, is in some ways the book’s core. His chief target is academia’s alleged blindness in dealing with the question of whether non-humans have a ‘theory of mind’. (This phrase, in its technical sense, is about whether a being has an awareness of another being’s thoughts – whether it can take decisions based on calculations of what the other guy might be thinking.) Safina is impatient with academic philosophers, claiming that the answer to this question is so obviously ‘yes’ that it’s daft to ask it: from a sandpiper tricking a pursuing peregrine, to his own dog rolling over to ask for a tummy stroke, his examples are many and various.

Safina packs his book with examples of incredible behaviours from individual animals – I have highlighted so many in my copy that I don’t know where to start. But the editor has given me space in the print version of this review for one example (more online): two captive killer whales puzzled observers by, in the hour between dawn and the actual sunrise, squirting water and licking a small spot on the inside glass of their tank, near the water line. Then someone noticed that the sun’s first rays hit that spot exactly. And parrots give their chicks individual, phonically differentiated, names. (That’s two: shhh!)

Beyond Words is extremely readable, and very well produced (it has a great index and is fully referenced). And it is extremely important.

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There are three main areas, I think, where Safina uses real-life examples to push our understanding of animal minds: sympathy, art, and what I can only call telepathy.

This last, ‘telepathy’, is something Safina himself, as a scientist, is unhappy about, and leaves as implied, not directly stated: he doesn’t want to reach certain conclusions, and seeks alternative explanations. Some dolphins used to regularly swim round a researchers’ boat; one day they approached but stayed at a distance, and didn’t do their usual frolicking; no one could work out why, until the news came up from below that one of the people on board had died.

Safina posits three degrees of fellow-feeling: empathy – feeling the same emotion as another: ‘you feel fear, so I feel fear’; sympathy – being aware of, but not oneself feeling, another’s emotion: ‘you are clearly in pain; I can’t share that, but understand what you are going through’; and compassion – actively seeking to reduce another’s pain. He provides ample evidence that animals do all three. An elephant took a wounded woman to the shade of a tree and guarded her all night. Bottle-nosed dolphins have rescued humans in difficulty on the water, including circling and bringing back to land an eighteen-year old girl who’d attempted suicide (she lived). And killer whales (which are in fact dolphins – the world’s largest) have rescued dogs who were drowning after trying to swim to their masters, and have guided research boats lost in fog for miles back to their base.

As for art, whales clearly have artistically playful minds. My final example involves a pool cleaner and a bottle-nosed dolphin. The cleaner was having a cigarette break; a baby dolphin watched, went to mummy, suckled, came back, and squirted milk out to create a cloud of ‘smoke’ around her head, like that around the cleaner.